by Justin Hill
‘Reavers have come! Hide!’ she said. ‘Do not come out! You have no idea what heathen men will do!’
Kendra ran into the brew house and hid herself behind a barrel of ale. She smeared her face with dirt from the floor. She felt the horsemen ride into the cobbled yard, felt her heart beating and heard her breath coming in quick gasps.
‘Who are you!’ she heard Agnes shout, but then there was a slap and Agnes screamed.
Kendra burrowed lower. She wished she’d found a better hiding place. Moments passed. She heard voices outside. The brew-house door banged open. She held her breath, crouched lower. A grinning face leered over her, and a hairy hand reached out to grasp her. He took a handful of hair and dragged her out.
‘Look here!’ he said.
Kendra gritted her teeth. She kicked and thrashed and tried to bite the man, and he shook her violently and threw her through the doorway. She banged her elbow and the pain ricocheted up her arm as she fell to the ground. He grabbed her hair again and swung her into the yard.
Men laughed. Another hand grasped her arm and pulled her to her feet. He tore her clothes, and when she tried to push his hands away, he hit her, and she went limp with shock.
‘Have you no shame?’ Agnes demanded. It was all a blur but Agnes was there and so it was all right. Agnes pulled the man away. She grabbed Kendra and Kendra fell against her. ‘Touching a girl who has been promised to Christ! The Devil must have got into you. Have you no shame?’
Kendra tried to look like a girl about to take oaths. The man laughed and spat as if Kendra was not worth his attention and Agnes bundled her away from the confusion as the men swirled about, seizing anything of value.
‘Hurry!’ Agnes’s hands shoved Kendra away. Her hands said it all: Hurry, hurry, hide!
‘Heh!’ a voice shouted.
Agnes kept shoving. They were running towards the chapel. The chapel bell was ringing alarm. It stopped abruptly. Someone must have killed the bell man.
Agnes kept shoving.
‘You!’
The orange-haired man grabbed Kendra’s arm.
Agnes stood between them. He threw her to the side, pulled Kendra away. ‘Here’s one!’ he said.
He dragged Kendra to the brew-house and threw her on to the table. Kendra kicked and struggled, but he was too strong for her. He pulled her towards him and tugged at his trousers. Then she stopped looking at him. She stared at the wall. The board where spoons and knives hung. She thought for a moment of reaching for a knife, but the man was huge and this had happened before and she knew the best thing was to lie still and pray for it all to be over.
The orange-haired man finished with a grunt.
‘That’s for Brihtric,’ he said, and slapped her so hard she fell off the table. She spat blood from her mouth, pretended to be dead.
‘Let her be, you beast!’ Agnes said. ‘Off with you now. You’ve done your worst.’
The man looked around as if wondering if he had really done his worst and decided not.
‘Orc!’ he shouted. ‘Orm!’
Agnes and Kendra did not wait to see who these men were. Kendra pulled her clothes round her and ran barefoot over the stone and ruts, Agnes ran with her.
They reached the chapel with a sigh of relief and fell in a hot heap on the chapel floor.
Christ watched with his bold painted eyes. His face was stony and impassive. Stern or alarmed, it was hard to tell. Or deeply compassionate and caring.
‘Beasts!’ Agnes said. ‘Bastards!’
Kendra let her talk. She was exhausted, and relieved to still be alive.
She dabbed the back of her hand to her lip. It had split, and her cheek felt swollen. She refused to sit down. She got up and spat out her blood, stood and waited with the other womenfolk, watched with horror as the men put Godwin’s hall to flame. Someone had brought Godmaer down from the field. He was alive, but only just. Agnes took her son and cradled his bloody head in her lap, laid him out on the altar.
‘Godmaer!’ she whispered in his ear as she felt for his pulse and her skirts became sticky with his blood. ‘Do not go, my child.’
Agnes promised many things, as she had on nights when he was a child tormented by fever, or haunted by night spirits, but the cut in his head was deep and the blood flowed faster than Kendra could wipe. They all stood around and looked on as his skin grew paler and paler and his pulse weakened. Soon it was clear that he had gone.
*
The horsemen did their worst.
It was a long while before the women dared to come out. Serving men lay dead. They gathered the bodies up, laid them down gently, as if putting them to sleep.
They were still alive. They were the lucky ones. They comforted each other, watched in horror as Wulfnoth’s hall was devoured by red and yellow flames. The fire was too far gone to stop. All they could do was stand and watch as it burned. It had been a dreadful day. They all began to weep and cry and mourn, and Heaven swallowed the bitter smoke.
BOOK II
CHAPTER ONE
Overmod
It was July before Godwin arrived back at Contone. Summer had reached its peak and the woods and fields were dressed in deepest green, the sheep lay in the shade of trees, the meadows were bright with insects and flowers. His apple-brown stallion walked firmly forward.
Godwin had grown. He looked older and bigger. Two thick gold bands clung to his arm, and he wore a silver belt about his waist. His blue eyes were hard as clenched fists as he looked at the ruin of his father’s hall: briars and singed grass, a charred square where home had been.
Godwin came alone. There was no one there to greet him. No kind words or gentle hands, none of the faces he had hoped to see. Inside the hall, the hearth was overhung with ember-scarred beams, the horn-curved gables were charred ruins. Wind whistled where men once sang; pale ash smothered the benches and high table where the gold-giver sat, and men passed the harp from hand to hand. Walls that once enclosed brave warriors, bright with gold and the joy of victory, now lay in blackened mounds.
Fate had broken it. A fool he had been to fare north without leaving protection for his folk. Godwin heard a door open. It came from the direction of the brew-house. He turned to see Kendra walking over to greet him, barefoot with her shawl pulled over her head and shoulders. She stopped ten feet away from where his stallion stood, shaded her eyes and looked up at him.
‘You have returned,’ she said.
‘Greetings,’ Godwin said. He slid from the saddle. His throat was tight with fury, his face set hard.
Kendra’s hair was unbound. The wind caught a lock and threw it across her face. With a single finger she pushed it back behind her ear. ‘You have heard,’ she said.
Godwin nodded. He turned back to the branded square. He had more than heard; he had seen.
Godwin’s men stayed at the lower hall in Harditone. Many families had moved lower down the valley, but a few brave souls had remained, Kendra and Agnes among them.
‘Who would look after your father’s hall?’ Agnes said later, but it seemed to Godwin that she was staying to look after Kendra, who refused to leave.
‘This is a good place,’ Kendra said, and felt a wave of emotion at the thought of leaving. ‘I wandered long before I found it. I will not be driven away.’
That evening they sat in the barn. A low blaze smouldered. Agnes threw kitchen scraps on; the smoke was harsh and acrid. Anger burnt within Godwin. Shame and fury entwined like rods of steel and iron. Look what happened while you laughed and feasted at the victor’s table!
Overmod, the poets called it: hubris.
Kendra told the tale. ‘They came in daylight,’ she said, ‘like king’s men. A big man led them. No one came to help us, not from Meredone or Harditone. They fled. All who stood against them were cut down.’
Godwin nodded. His anger glowed like a well-blasted fire, the coals turning from grey to a baleful red, like a dragon’s eye, now orange and yellow, till they glowed almost white with rage
. ‘Tell me who is left.’
Kendra listed the dead instead: Brunstan, Godmaer, Deor, Hareth … It was a long list.
‘Anything else?’
Kendra paused. ‘They were led by a man with orange hair.’
Godwin caught the look in her eye. ‘A big man?’
She nodded. ‘Ugly. Brutal. He was their leader. He was one of Eadric’s men.’
Godwin knew the man.
‘He said “This is for Brihtric.”’
‘Did he?’
Godwin remembered when he was a boy and had hidden in the Weald. A baby had been born nine months later and drowned in the beck, sent to Christ blameless.
‘Anything else?’ he said.
Kendra shook her head. ‘No.’
There were new notches on Næling’s edge. Godwin ground them out with long rasping strokes. He worked out every nick and dent, oiled the blade till it gleamed red with firelight. They had come from the Weald. Men must have aided them. He imagined his foe waiting in the dark, haunted forest, planning their revenge.
Heroes laughed at moments like these, but Godwin was no hero. He took this personally. It cut to the quick, like a well-honed knife that butchers flesh from bone. His folk had sworn him service and protection, and now they lay dead or in the arms of his enemies. His men sat around. He had told them the tale and their hearts burnt with fury.
‘They could be anywhere,’ Caerl said.
Godwin called all the bereaved men together at the stone cross at Hiddeswrthe. He climbed to the top of the stone and put his hands out for silence. The crowd waited expectantly. Godwin’s face was humourless. He did not mention Eadric, but addressed what was common among them all.
‘For too long we have suffered. We have suffered under a cowardly king. We have suffered under the Danes. We have suffered under unfair taxes, which have been raised too late, when all the damage has been done. And now brigands and lawless men have set upon our homes while our fighting men rode north against the Danes. Can we trust Ethelred? No! There is no law unless we impose it. Let us take spear and fire into the Weald and rid ourselves of this den of thieves.’
Men knew the names of Orc and Orm. They were two brothers, a thegn’s sons, who had turned outlaw years before and had earnt an evil name among the people of the Weald. The iron-smelters – honest but wary folk – were glad to help. They pointed deep into the forest.
‘They are cruel men. They have many camps, but they were staying at Grim’s Ring a week ago.’
‘And where is that?’
They pointed. ‘Yonder. A summer’s day’s ride.’
Godwin rode hard. His men galloped behind him. They spotted the ring of trees from miles off. It was a bald dome that peeped over the forest. The huts of the rough reaver camp were all roofed with turf to stop raiders burning them in their sleep. The place was deserted, but the horse dung still steamed.
‘There has been a hasty departure,’ Caerl said. ‘They cannot be far off. Look – these footprints are still filling with water.’
In the main house, a low fire burnt in the hearth.
The brothers fled from Sudsexe into Sudrie, Sudsexe again and then Cantware. Godwin followed them from camp to camp, relentless as a starving wolf.
At the end of a frustrating fortnight they caught the reavers red-handed, in a camp deep within the Weald. There were seventeen of them. A pitiful bunch, like servants tricked out in armour, no match for Godwin’s mailed and mounted and murderous retainers. There had been an argument and the two brothers had come to blows. Orm lay dead, but Orc was there. He was a short, thin man with dark hair and clear blue eyes. He had been wounded in the fight, and his face was pale, his arm cradled against his ribs, the sling stained with fresh blood.
Towards him strode Godwin. He was as grim as the Archangel Gabriel. He stood over the man and glared down at him.
‘You burnt my hall. Who put you to this evil work?’ he demanded.
‘No one,’ the bastard spat.
Godwin struck him.
‘Who put you to this?’
‘No one,’ the man said.
Godwin gripped his bleeding arm and his thumb dug in, as the nails had dug into Christ’s palms and fixed him to the wooden cross.
Orc ground his teeth in agony.
‘Is this Eadric’s work?’
‘Eadric who?’
‘Who was the flame-haired man?’
‘There was no flame-haired man.’
Godwin had no time for treacherous liars. He unsheathed his sword, grasped the man’s head and struck it from his shoulders, tossed it into the thicket, where it caught and snagged and hung: a gruesome witness.
Næling was bare and bloodied as Godwin walked towards Orc’s men. He was breathing heavily. The summer leaves were a wall of green behind his back. Gnats swirled in the air above his head.
He spoke in a quiet voice. ‘Tell me what have I done to you that you should bereave me so? Who put you up to this? Was it Eadric? Who was the man with the red hair?’
The men said that they had nothing to do with any of them. Godwin kicked one of the cringing men and lifted his face to look him in the eye.
‘You choose to bereave me?’ he demanded, but the man shrank back and clawed at his legs.
Another man blabbed, ‘I do not know of Eadric, but the red-haired man was named Offa.’
Godwin fixed that name in his heart. He let the man go and turned away.
‘Mercy! We were honest men once!’ they wept.
But they were outlaws and murderers and thieves, and he had no mercy. Honest men indeed!
‘And whores were virgins once!’ Godwin said, and spat into the ground and turned his back. ‘Hang the lot of them,’ he said in disgust. ‘Let Christ sort out the guilty.’
When Godwin returned to Contone, his mind was troubled. He walked down to the streamside, stripped off and waded into the blurred and stony pool.
It was a quiet spot with an overhanging oak tree and a wattle fence to keep the cattle from trampling the water, which fell clear and light over the stones. It was chill to the touch. Godwin’s skin seemed to shrink about him, like loving arms. He shut his eyes, put his head back and let it float lightly on the water, his hair caught by the currents that flowed between the rocks, trailing downstream like yellow weeds.
Godwin looked up through the green oak leaves to where the sun shone in the blue sky. He and his brother had come here to spy on the girls on their bathing day. They’d got a beating for their troubles, but they’d come again.
It struck Godwin as strange. He had always imagined Leofwine older and wiser and more knowledgeable than himself, but Leofwine had only been twelve when he had died and Godwin was seventeen now and he felt notched and gnarled, as tough as old roots.
Godwin lay still on his back. Summer sunlight dappled green light all about him. His skin carried scars, and he was proud of each one, could name the moment he received them, and the moment he had dealt a blow in return. As the breeze whispered through the boughs, a few beams fell straight through the canopy and he shut his eyes against their light, ducked down under the water, came up refreshed.
Godwin’s clothes hung on a low gorse bush, waiting for him to give them shape. He looked at them. They were fine garments. The clothes a prince might wear: with silk and silver embroidery around the hems and cuffs, and the finest calfskin shoes. When his skin was clean he strode out. His broad shoulders and narrow waist shed droplets of water. He sat on the grass and dried himself before dressing and returning to the hall.
‘Edmund thinks I should marry,’ Godwin said to Kendra that evening.
It was hard to read from her reaction what she thought.
‘And do you want to marry?’
‘Of course,’ he said, as if it was as obvious as buying a sword or a prize stallion. ‘It is just a matter of when.’
‘Does he have someone in mind for you?’
‘I doubt it,’ Godwin said. ‘The virtuous daughter of some grand family, wit
h wide hips and broad shoulders. She’ll have to give good strong sons.’
Godwin had been unusually glum since he had returned, so she was glad to see the glimmer of humour in his eyes.
‘His grandmother died,’ she said.
‘I know.’
‘It was good she died before she heard.’
Neither of them spoke for a long time.
‘So,’ Kendra asked after a while, ‘what happened in the north?’
Godwin sighed. He was tired of telling the tale. The whole country had mourned when they had heard that Athelstan, the king’s eldest son, had died; Ethelred’s children were an unlucky lot.
‘Were you there?’
Godwin nodded.
‘He knew he was dying. He made his peace with God. He spoke well to all of us and charged us with defending England should the Danes come again. He petitioned the king to return my father’s lands. I had the charter sent to Cicestre.’
‘And the Danes?’
Godwin drew in a deep breath. ‘Well, there was no great battle. The Danes would not fight.’ Godwin started to say something else, but then he stopped. ‘We stood on the banks of the Hymbre and they escaped.’
‘They landed at Sandwice.’
Godwin nodded. He had heard. Knut had landed at Sandwice, demanded a tax, cut the hands and noses and ears off all the hostages that men had given him, and then sailed home. Good riddance, he thought. He hoped it was the last he would hear of him.
‘I never thought men could be so difficult. We crossed the whole country. We were eager for battle. And then there was no battle, and everyone began to complain about the plunder. How could they reward their followers? Men brawled before the king!’
Godwin shook his head. ‘Eadric wanted Ethelred to punish Morcar’s folk for sheltering the Danes, but Edmund and Athelstan prevailed. Ethelred had forgiven all crimes, and sworn a heavy oath, and he did not forget it. But the people of Lindesi in Lincoliascir were not so lucky. It was said that they were planning to ride out with the Danes. They were like the scrap of meat that stops starving dogs from eating each other. So we ravaged the land.’